Page 11 of Rent a Mob Boss

Deb looks like she’s witnessing a crime. “I really don’t think⁠—”

“Wherever you need me to sign,” I decide, and that ends the discussion.

I’ve negotiated with men who held guns. I’ve sat across tables from people who wanted me dead and made them decide, over the course of an evening, that they’d rather not go through with it. I am, by any reasonable measure, a persuasive man.

Poptart couldn’t care less.

He plants all four legs in the gravel and leans back against the lead rope with the immovable conviction of something that has never once in its life been in a hurry.

“Push him,” I tell Deb.

“You don’t push a⁠—”

“Quinn, take the front. I’ll take the back.”

“Why do I get the front?” she asks.

“Because the back is where the kicking happens.”

That gets through to her. She’s got the lead rope, and she’s crouched down at the animal’s eye level, talking to it in a low, ridiculous, sing-song voice. “Come on, buddy. It’s a nice car. It’s a luxury car. You’re gonna love it; it even has heated seats.”

Meanwhile, I get my shoulder against roughly two hundred pounds of stubborn. Lillie stands off to the side and yells encouragement to everyone, including the pony. Somehow, between Quinn’s encouragement about heated seats, my shoulder, and one well-timed apple, the animal lurches into the back of my car.

The suspension drops. Something creaks that has never creaked before.

My moment of triumph doesn’t last long before I realize what I’ve done. There is a small horse in the back of my BMW. Its head is between the two front seats, and it is, once again, chewing.

At first, I’m afraid Quinn hurt herself. She’s bent over with her hands on her knees, and she’s wheezing. It’s only when I reach for her, planning to touch her shoulder, that she waves a hand and lifts her red face. “I can’t—” She’s laughing too hard to finish. The silent kind that shakes her shoulders. She wipes her eyes and looks at me before losing it all over again. “There is a horse in your BMW.”

“It’s a pony.” Then I open the passenger door for her, because I am still a gentleman, even when there’s livestock in my car. I’m not crazy about the idea of Lillie sharing her seat, but Quinn makes sure the seatbelt is buckled around both of them, with Lillie firmly in her lap.

The drive starts out fine, which I have to admit is a surprise. There is a good twenty minutes where I drive carefully, and the horse seems to be handling himself like a pro.

Until Poptart decides to unceremoniously lift his tail and deposit a substantial and steaming contribution directly onto the cream leather of my back seat. I mean, it plops. Loudly.

The sound is followed by a beat of absolute silence.

Then several things happen at once.

First, the smell arrives. Actually, arrives is the wrong word. The smell invades. Lillie shrieks—the delighted, horrified shriek of a child who has just witnessed the single funniest and most disgusting event of her entire life and needs the entire world to know about it. I feel her about to escalate, to become fully unglued.

Then Quinn jumps in to manage things.

“Okay,” she says, calm and bright. “Poptart said hello. That’s how horses say hello. New game. We’re gonna hold our breath like we’re underwater, okay? Deep breath. We’re divers, we’re going down.”

Lillie sucks in a huge breath and puffs her cheeks out. Quinn puffs hers out too.

“Windows,” Quinn murmurs out the side of her mouth while still holding her breath. I put every window down, and soon, the four of us are flying down the highway at seventy with the wind roaring through, and a horse’s mane whipping around and Lillie shrieking with laughter. And then there’s Quinn, conducting the entire operation like a woman who was born for exactly this.

It takes three staff to extract Poptart from the vehicle and install him in the paddock. Lillie has to be physically carried inside for a bath, protesting the entire way that she wants to be with her horse. Ms. Beaumont peels her off my hip. “I’ll take care of this,” she offers. “You’ve obviously had a trying day so far.”

I can’t argue with that, though it’s not the day I’m thinking about as I climb the stairs, nor is it the work waiting for me in my office.

It’s the girl climbing the steps behind me. She has to be the most composed, levelheaded girl I’ve ever met. Just twenty years old, but she handled that beautifully.

“I’m pretty sure the smell is permanently lodged in my brain,” she says with a chuckle as we enter the front hall.

“It was a memorable smell,” I agree, sniffing my shirt and wrinkling my nose. “It also clings to everything.”